7 - Traditional Criticism, 1976–1990

Summary

THE EXPLOSION OF CRITICISM of Austen's fiction based on new approaches to literary study may have pushed more traditional forms of criticism to the side, but by no means did these disappear from the critical landscape. Textual studies, biographies, and various forms of “old-style” formal and aesthetic analysis, as well as a healthy collection of humanist commentaries, continued to be published during the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these, however, reflect the influence of recent theoretical studies, especially feminist critiques of Austen's fiction, even when that debt is unacknowledged. Only occasionally after 1970 does a critic willfully ignore, or specifically reject, the work of theorists in advancing our understanding of Austen's fiction.

Biographies

Three important biographical studies appeared during the 1980s that revised received opinion about Austen The first to appear, John Halperin's The Life of Jane Austen (1984), caused Austen lovers notable discomfort. The idea of Austen as the spiteful spinster, first fleshed out by D. W. Harding and later delineated more fully by Marvin Mudrick, found another champion in Halperin, who demonstrates in exhaustive detail that the novelist was “a woman of many moods” (ix). The “moods” Halperin stresses, however, are ones that cast Austen in a decidedly negative light. If there is a way to summarize Halperin's view, it might be that he sees Austen as a girl from a family whose means were not quite sufficient to provide her the financial security and social prospects she felt she deserved.